Olympic videos overcome language barriers

SANTA MONICA — Digital advertising agency The ZiZo Group led the creation of one of the single-largest social media video campaigns in Olympic history. Raising an Olympian is a 21-video collection of inspiring profiles of the moms of international Olympic athletes, who share insight on the dedication and support each competitor gained on the long road to London. The clips are housed online and have received millions of views. In addition to English, the videos were posted in 10 different languages.

The ZiZo Group offers brands targeted strategies to create and leverage online video as a social media marketing platform. This is their area of expertise; language translation and localization is not. For a global project of this scope, the creative team knew that accurate language translation would be vital to viewer engagement. So, the agency partnered with a language service provider, TransPerfect, during the production process. The language translation and localization experts collaborated and consulted with The ZiZo Group from the planning stage through completion of the project.

Part of the collaboration included the creation of interview questions for the Olympians and their mothers in their native languages; language interpretation services during the live, on-location interviews around the world; and the translation and drafting of complete video scripts for multi-lingual videos. The company also helped with translation and localization of the post production video subtitling, enabling international viewers to view and understand the videos.

A language specialist was on-set at the international shoot locations to conduct the in-language interviews with the Olympic athletes and their moms, providing The ZiZo Group with translations of each response. These translated responses became the scripts for each video, simplifying the editing and subtitling processes for the post-production team.